There are two distinct elements at work here….
First: hundreds of years ago, there was a boy named Daven who went up against a dragon and lost. In the process, though, each received a kind of infusion of the other’s blood, creating a bond between them.
(There’s a whole long story, there, but to sum up, dragons are creatures of pure chaos, raw energy undirected. Humans are granted the special power of order, reason, to overcome their environment. The combination of the two made a single entity greater than its racial template, as it were.)
Daven had three sons by his wife Isabelle. After the birth of the first son, Isabelle also bonded a dragon, and as a result their second and third sons exhibited remarkable characteristics. They were born with a vast potential of power, inhuman authority, and they gravitated toward extremes. Isaiah became a creature of pure order, an aesthete who divorced himself from the messy chaos of humanity. Damion, on the other hand, embraced the raw power of chaos, embodying its lust for power and thirst for life. He became a monster, a terrible force that fed upon the blood of man for its survival and bent its victims to its own dark purposes.
Damion was not all dragon, though, and his roots in humanity tethered him to a sort of order, a limitation he could never escape. No matter how his power grew, he was always defeated by the unity of man, and the desire for order and control. Undying, immortal, he was always driven from any place he claimed. His greatest weakness was the overwhelming and unifying power of the Darken Orthodox, a strict and extensive branch of the ancient King’s church.
(Part the second)
The Darken Orthodox held sway over all the lands of the Ardain, the southern mainland that had once been part of the FirstKing’s lands. A century after the death of Daven the kings of the land lost control of their realm, and the Ardain rose up in rebellion, dividing into four kingdoms, known as the Major Baronies. In the city of Darken, in the southeast of these lands, stood a Cathedral that rivaled any in the world, commissioned from the wealth of Daven himself. Following the rebellion against the crown, the Darken Cathedral became the heart of the Darken Orthodox, the church of the Major Baronies.
The church’s power was absolute, and gave the Darken kingdom a political dominance of the other three. The church had its own order of knights, who had political authority to cross any border at will, and bore full judicial authority throughout the Ardain region. Many of the powerful resented the church’s clout, but the commoners were a devout people, and church prospered.
It came to pass, though, that an heir of the ancient king was found in the Northlands, and a high-ranking officer within the church’s Order Knights started a war to re-establish the old king’s throne. Civil war came, then, with five sides fighting each other, and in the Chaos, the church lost much of its hold on the nations.
In this atmosphere, the wandering Damion saw a chance for power. He began on the outskirts of one of the Major Baronies, on the border between civilization and wilderness. He began to establish a presence within a small town, gradually building influence over its citizens and amassing an army. There were rumors of dark tidings, but it was a dark time throughout the nation, and none looked too closely into the rumors.
This is the background. Our story begins when a lowly soldier returns home. A one-time Order Knight, disgusted with the policies and practices of the church in its prosecution of the war, abandons his faith and his assignment and seeks to return home. It is a dangerous journey through lands torn by war, but when he arrives home, he finds his village dark, changed, and a gloomy tower stands on the horizon where a beautiful, mysterious stranger has taken up residence.
Naturally, hilarity ensues.